Young Mike appears to be the winner financially, earning a shitload of royalties from the song. There’s something slightly endearing about a 14 year old writing a hit song and seeing it get to the top albeit 10 years later. There’s hope for many adolescent bedroom lyricists out there. The suicide aspect from an Ian Curtis point of view seems to be an unhappy coincidence. I would never attribute Mr Noel Edmonds pinning his colours to Joy Division’s mast. He was always a lover of whimsy and japery and if he ever gazed into an abyss, his first thought would be “we’re gonna need more custard”. So why then did he go for the M*A*S*H theme in such a big way? The dreaminess and airbrushed feel of the song removes it from any starkness emotionally. The session singers with their close harmonies suck you in and force the lyrics to wash over you without their meaning or message to penetrate, which makes sense really when you consider the film itself is the message. If Edmonds was a fan of the film or Altman’s work then he’s simply enforcing his tastes upon the British public from his DJ booth at Radio 1. His power was not to be underestimated, wresting the coveted breakfast slot from Tony Blackburn, Noel gives us prank calls and John Snagg. His Lord of Tomfoolery persona was popular at pre-playlist R1. Railing against new wave and post-punk, Edmonds favours disco, soft-rock and ballads. People listened to him and were entertained by him. He was ice to Tiswas’ fire on a Saturday morning. He was Middle England. He was mediocrity. He was safe.

And that’s what “Suicide Is Painless” is. You listen to the song, you watch the movie, you laugh at Klinger as he endures his own personal Catch 22 in the TV series, and you know you are safe. You’ll go to bed in 1980 and be woken by your radio alarm clock to the safe tones of Edmonds winding up some poor sap on the other end of a phone, ignoring the running sore Stateside as America comes to terms with 50,000 war dead 5 years after the last chopper leaves Saigon.

Secondly, we need to take into consideration the role and purpose of Noel Edmonds, since it was his inexplicable plugging of the film’s ten-year-old theme song, combined with the belated popularity of the TV series (it was consistently top of BBC2’s ratings), which saw it become an unexpected number one in Britain. In parallel with M*A*S*H*, Edmonds focused on creating an imperturbable and impenetrable world within a world on his long-running Radio 1 shows; a passed and closed-off society of granges and servants, of bemused newsreaders and arbitrary sports commentary cut-ups whose main purpose appeared to be the deliberate avoidance of a realer and bloodier world outside. That this eventually proved a fatal fantasy is something which may need to be returned to when the time comes. Yet there was controversy over the success of “Suicide Is Painless”; was its plugging reckless, its motive naively foolish?

The third thing to consider is the then-recent suicide of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis; “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Closer would have been sufficiently harrowing journals had he lived, but his absence suddenly made all “gestures” in rock or pop seem fake, insufficient; there was, as the lyrics to Closer solemnly prove, no distance between their arenas of agony and the unsupportable pain of their author. Nobody affected by Joy Division, least of all me, felt like listening to very much else that summer – but the dangers of basing a future life on “The Eternal” and “Decades” were already clearly apparent. In such a context, “Suicide Is Painless” seemed a little…gauche, a pretty cruel and pitiless joke.

Then again, if the song’s lyrics do read like fourth-form Baudelaire (“The sword of time will pierce our skins” accompanied by that stinging glockenspiel which feels like a needle splashing into a rivulet of vital blood), that may be because they were actually written by a fourteen-year-old – Mike Altman, Robert’s son – and set to music by the film’s composer Johnny Mandel. The session singers have remained anonymous; they are not the Association, or even the Four Seasons, although their close (closing?) harmonies derive from that era. But the agony is conveyed effectively because of the apparent lack of overt emotionalism in the song’s delivery; as it crouches down to allow the final sarcastic/defeated retort “And you can do the same thing, if you please” there is a nonchalance which borders on numbness. Contrast with the overwrought, hysterical treatment given to the same song by the Manic Street Preachers, who scored their first top ten hit with their cover in 1992; but then again, consider the horribly real pain of Richey Edwards being channelled through Bradfield’s screaming lungs…and wonder how we can ever recognise real screams, especially when screamed squarely in our faces.

Actually, I do really like this a lot now. I think that it has a really shadowy and ghostly feel to it. You could castigate the lyrics for being adolescent, but I’d reflect that in some instances, in the mix of emotions, there’s a sense of vainglory in suicide that is a bit adolescent…

All of this is accentuated in the Manics version which is almost unbearably thrilling, the characteristicly barked lyrics and approximation of Guns ‘n’ Roses riffs, giving it a scorched earth sensation of either life itself crashing out in an act of self-immolation, or something new (harsher but new) arising from an act of destruction.

I saw Miss Saigon, the stage musical. Not far off Bangkok, settingwise.. And yes, helicopters. But it was lights/mirrors/sounds rather than an actual mock-up…

I remember having the choice between going to see Miss Saigon or Metropolis the Musical. I think I chose Metropolis because i figured it would be a silent musical (clearly a miscalculation which I twigged the moment Brian Blessed walked on stage).

(the only bit of it i can find on the net reads as follows: “”The New York Times must be firebombed into nothingness … while Cameron Mackintosh and his production staff should be slowly beaten to death with blunt instruments; this year’s Pulitzer Prize judges in drama could be used for the [ends here]“

One time, the BBC got the wrong version of one episode, and for the want of the right one, aired it. That week, they had loads of complaints. Yep, laughter track.